The band’s new album shows that their self-imposed exile in Berlin was time well spent and gives full vent to their original spiky sound

Touted as the next big thing in Irish music in the mid-Noughties — they bagged
the Meteor Award for Best New Act in 2006 — it didn’t take long for the
Dublin post-punk outfit Humanzi to be found out. Having secured the
most-hyped record deal by an Irish group in years, signing to a subsidiary
of Universal Music after apparently frenzied bidding, Humanzi’s 2006 debut
album, Tremors, failed to register even minutely.

The band disappeared, and deservedly so — Tremors, with its angsty
undergraduate tone, made Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove seem mature.

Thankfully, the band’s new album, Kingdom of Ghosts, released after a hiatus
of four years, is different. Released in February, it shows that Humanzi are
still prone to hubris — it was recorded self-consciously in a derelict
former East German radio station — but also that their self-imposed exile in
Berlin was time well spent. The album gives full vent to the